Jpowellguitars scale playing

Hey @Jpowellguitars, moved your clips here as they were getting buried in the swiping discussion in the other thread - I think that can live on its own!

Looks like a very good foundation! I discussed this with @Troy, and if you are interested you’ll probably be able to play these scales swipe-free if you exploit the full potential of your wrist motions.

As a starting point you can try to play cleanly single-escape phrases (e.g. first some upstroke-only escape stuff that moves across the strings, then some downstroke-only escape phrases). Ideally, you’d want to have a very similar hand setup for the two things, just make different wrist motions.

The aim would be to memorise the feeling of clean string changes of the two types, that you can then seek in your 3nps scale practice. (A bit of swiping will probably still happen, like it does to most of us, but its impact will most likely be minimised).

In any case the only real “rule” for me is: if it sounds good it’s good :slight_smile:

Hi @tommo and thanks, I’ve been working on the single slant licks from the PSP and I’m already noticing it’s becoming more natural, in fact I can already feel that my hand wants to do it on certain passages so hopefully it wont take long to make it the rule.

Do you think the swiping is hindering my playing having seen these clips? Picking has always been the weak link for me to the point where I’ve been wondering if I was doing something mechanically wrong, this lockdown has catalysed me to join @Troys site to try and improve it.

I’m going to continue to work on the 2WPS either way, I already feel like knowing that I’m doing these things has opened a massive door. Any advice you could give would be really appriciated.

:smiley:

Based on your current technique, our recommendation is to look through the wrist motion section of the primer - as you should be able to achieve both escapes with wrist motions (or mainly wrist).

The forearm-assisted method shown in the “conquering the scale” part (I assume you mean this by TWPS?) is of course also another valid method to play scales, but I don’t think you’ll need it. Moreover, (mostly) @Troy and (a little) myself are working on updating that part to clarify further the “pickslanting VS escape motions” relationship.

Re: swiping I can hear bits of it in the clips above, but keep in mind I trained myself to listen to these tiny details for the past 5+ years! Overall you sound great already and with a bit of gain / compression + the rest of the instruments in a mix I doubt anyone would catch the swipes.

In any case it is likely that if you do the proper wrist motions, the swipes will get even more silent (if they’ll occur at all).

@tommo Thank you soo much for the reply, these directions are so helpful.

I actually watched that yesterday and have been working on this motion which seems to be clearing the strings, it’s hard to tell if I’m doing it from the wrist or if I’m doing it correctly, it feels better to me though.